Design Discourse - Composing and Revising Programs in Professional and Technical Writing, 2010a

Lipson
and in more recent years of advanced doctoral students assigned to administrative
internships or other leadership roles. Full-time faculty are in the minority.
We had three at the beginning of the Writing Program and now number eleven
(two are half time with another department). The success of the Writing Program
from the start depended on including the part-time faculty as partners in
inventing and fleshing out courses from the deliberately brief and nonspecific
course descriptions. The part-time faculty were involved in teaching the technical-writing
course, whether they had technical-writing background or not; they
were involved in teaching the other three studio courses, and in helping mentor
other teachers. They functioned like advanced graduate students of the Writing
Program in early years, and as a group they were quite concerned about loss of
stature and access to faculty when the PhD program came on board.
As a result, a number of the early technical-writing courses followed
textbooks to teach standard forms. Yet these same teachers would never have accepted
such a formulaic approach in their composition courses. I had to swallow
this, and hope that native pedagogical talent would come to the fore once the
unfamiliarity of technical writing passed for these teachers. As an administrator
since the mid-eighties—a period of twenty years—with just a few scattered
years as a regular faculty member, facing faculty conflicts involving power and
influence on curricular directions, facing serious medical issues with children,
parents, and other elderly relatives for whom I was responsible, and in one period
facing my own serious illness, I made a deliberate choice to just do my own
teaching and not do battle on the curricular control of the technical-writing
course, after one attempt at such leadership early on raised some ugly conflictbased
behaviors. So technical writing—now professional writing—at SU has
pretty well grown organically and collaboratively, with no particular leadership.
Assignments and units that I developed were taken up by some of the part-time
faculty and graduate students, but my focus involved intensive use of technology
for writing early on, and this was not portable to many of the teachers. There is
great variability among sections.
In 2000, a new director decided that the lower-division writing courses
needed strong faculty leadership in the development of curriculum and pedagogy.
As a result, there has been since 2000 a position entitled Director of Undergraduate
Studies; though the title implies leadership of the upper-division
technical-writing courses, the position has mainly focused on the lower division.
The first director had no background in technical or professional writing, and no
interest in teaching this course, nor does the recently appointed second faculty
director. Only three other current faculty besides me have taught the course—
one does so frequently, one will not do so voluntarily again, and one does so
rarely but willingly. Some doctoral students have developed brilliant versions of
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